Seldom do we regard the human form as specifically provocative outside of what varying degrees of sensually erotic presentation it may assume, and while very often this sort of provocation is accomplished by superficial embellishment it nevertheless must ultimately contend with the realities of flesh which beset it on all sides, to no exclusion of its own beholding. Behavioral and physical endowment by accident of material happenstance (social, genetic, etc.) is the usual thoroughfare for those few thusly privileged, and with considerably abysmal contrast to the greater mass of persons less favorably endowed. Yet is there at least one universally attainable tendency of form (or nearly so, barring but a handful of material maladies) and one undeniably provocative even well beyond what erotic appeal it may, or indeed may not bear forth: a tendency best characterized by the process of muscular development, or hypertrophy.

An immensity of muscle is provocative in a way unassailable by modesty of dress and manner, very nearly as obscene in its immunity to concealment as in what unabashed flaunting often enough attends such immensity. Most emblematic here is the bodybuilder's physique which any longer only suggests purposefulness rather than exemplifying its apex (as in the strongmen preceding it all the way back to antiquity). Which is to say that it has long since its inception jettisoned any pretense it ever indulged by demonstrable feats of strength, and all in peculiar favor of pageantry. Yet however incidentally does strength remain as consequence and facilitator of that hulking spectacle so far understood as particular to the bodybuilder, and it is only in this divorce of muscularity from all purpose other than arbitrary aesthetic idealization that an athleticism outside of any specificity of sport seems to emerge, aimless though it be.

What it means to wield so unimpeachably capable a form is as nebulous as the form itself likewise proves durably provocative within any popular notion thereof: practically without any distinctive purpose are "bulging muscles... as unnecessary as a classical education..."*; a surplus accumulation in every regard exceeding and upsetting all conventional notions of function or utility, both notions so obsequiously characterized by a pervasive temperance; sanguinely making a sport of so sore a matter as fleshly toils and sustenance. In short, muscularity is an obscenity socially designated only for the benefit of onlookers but as often an affront to modern unease which brooks no violation so little as to overstep the bounds of mere enjoyment.

Yet even as caricature and exaggeration (of itself) has bodybuilding as a practice (even informally as pageantry) proved ever ascendant, albeit in whatever degree watered down, as the singularly popular image of weight training, whether in pursuit of strength, health, or vanity, and has only waned really as victim to its own success and consequent bastardization--the ill appeal of both the "gym bro" and the slathered up "mass monster", as well its attendant universe of "bro science" and all manner of commercial snake oil. Waiting though patiently in wings all the while was the sport and science of strength, the former of which enjoyed briefly its own ascendancy (owed obliquely to a growing critical appreciation for the latter, as well the practical limits thereof) and has only itself waned in the reassertion of the narcissistic ideals and spectacle of bodybuilding, armed anew with a less-than-critical academic, as well a reinvigorated commercial appeal.

Bravely traversing the resultant no man's land between critical pragmatism and scrappy commercial narcissism however is so-called "natural" bodybuilding, ably and eagerly and, indeed, critically applying the practical lessons of both sport and science toward its own brand of temperate narcissism and wellness with a nostalgic bent. While falling prey to an arbitrary reverence for some bygone age of bodybuilding excellence and inheriting all the residual trappings and conventions thereof does the practice nevertheless distinguish itself by the unlikely company it keeps in both calisthenics and powerlifting, which together would seem a potent combination given the well-known shortcomings of either. This very combination would by itself already suggest a mode sufficient to some high level of bodily excellence and capability, albeit with none the more specific aim or purpose.

It is a mistake to imagine that bodybuilding somehow lost its way or purpose to have become so commercially and pharmacologically "compromised," to have been profaned in the intervening years since its bronze era. Indeed is the no man's land of natural bodybuilding an invention after-the-fact, having commanded no special reverence of its original and unwitting practitioners (and who could count them any more willing than witting), characterized most universally as simply discontented with themselves as anything short of extraordinary. What more would ever compel them to such rarefied heights of exertion and often joyless indulgence is as nontrivial to discern as what reservations might suffice to command they forgo any advantage in that regard. Easier to discern are the arbitrary conventions retained across all domains of bodybuilding, natural or otherwise, which is to say the specific targets of muscle size, as well those of general emaciation, the latter of which incidentally unable to do else but frustrate any progress in the former without significant pharmacological intervention.

Nevertheless do we find in bodybuilding's specifically arbitrary conventions of physique the suggestion of an exceedingly compensatory amalgamation of two types unique to sports of strength: one demanding of the forelimbs that they ably endure a singularly immense strain across all dimensions with no small ease; one demanding of the hindlimbs a nigh-boundless immensity of power production; either demanding of the trunk rigidity sufficient to demonstrate their respective capacities. This distinction we find to significant degree between calisthenics and powerlifting, as previously mentioned, but to its greatest extent in the Olympic events of gymnastics (at least in the men's variety) and weightlifting.

What grievance a bodybuilder might bear of any given sport of strength--apart from a general subordination of physique to performance--would surely find significant resolution in the measured combination of their respective training modalities. Yet this seldom resembles how a bodybuilder trains, though the results would conceivably bear no small measure of alignment as well even some degree of refinement as to what constitutes maximally balanced development. Instead does the bodybuilder obsess over "optimal" modalities for growth, geared toward arbitrary parameters based on little more than tradition among other insufficiently critical subjective criteria, though certainly driven by rational recognition of opportunity and a healthy thirst for glory--"because it's there" and so forth. Yet, while aesthetically there is a definite sense of being "too big" or to some extent "big enough" even among diehard enthusiasts (certainly of the natural proclivity, that proclivity significantly constraining its scope of ambition), the same could hardly be said of strength, even wheresoever it is eclipsed by a focus upon size; indeed size is pursued only as an expression of strength which is seldom attained in its absence.

This hardly constitutes a rebuke of bodybuilding as a practice, only a clarification of what it already tends toward, dispensing with its thin veneer while maintaining similar, and even more than similar outcomes, a way to reclaim performance as a criteria without denying its most palpable features, without allowing such a gulf to form between them, recognizing such a gulf as a mutual conceit between practices in similar measure "useful" and in far closer accord as useless or at least in considerable excess of any popular understanding of practicality, and rightly though tacitly and, to no lesser degree, woefully so.

Despite the excesses of any preoccupation with strength and hypertrophy, were we to consider the degree to which the various ills which beset persons the world over might be substantially alleviated, supplanted, or even exploited as well as, at the very least, assessed, we might be inclined toward such measures as convincingly both objective and meaningful with respect to well-being; namely in that they afford a higher and lifelong capacity for developmental maturation, so to speak, through effective kinesthetic and dietary play. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a person as free and autonomous when bereft of so basic, albeit uncommon a capacity, certainly for those who realize its attainment, but it is all the more difficult to regard a person as might be altogether unfamiliar with their value as well their methods of deriving such value as bearing any semblance of self-efficacy--often enough proving especially prone to an abundance of delusions if not sheer ignorance about bodily mechanics and metabolism. It is thus fair to attribute the provocative quality of muscularity to a popular unease--whether resentful or merely apprehensive--with such flagrant free-spiritedness, and of a sort which only eludes ambivalence by virtue of being so wrought, as it were, in flesh and its function.

Such palpable freedom of form, effort, and sustenance cannot but upset a prevailing temperance which counts itself as 'free from' innumerable contrivances of excess, never so indulgent as to even imagine what more freedom might be had of such excess in and of a sumptuous vigor met by rigors of like kind. Is it any wonder that among aspiring "improvers" of humanity that a discipline of denial and restraint reigns? that failing such an ascetic ideal do we find its mirror image in the solipsism of positivity and acceptance? itself no less tainted by the ascetic fly in its ointment for want of any excess of intervention and in denial of its very need, all the while paradoxically implying real need of such denial and, consequently, restraint on its behalf.

Even among those given to the excesses of bodybuilding does its characteristic audacity often lack wheresoever the emaciation of a desired physique prevails over the voluptuousness of ability (ironically often even over the ability to achieve said physique). This should not be confused as mere aesthetic innocence, mere taste, but rather as an aversion to the perceived harms of excess, to any undue stress upon some conceit of 'equilibrium,' often enough veiled under the quiet despair of "natural gifts" or the lack thereof--an unwillingness to "despoil" or else sheer trepidation.

There must be in all sincere acquaintance with the iron a sense of sacrifice and a willingness to destroy, and to destroy no lesser a thing than the self. There is a self inextricably bound up in delusions of form and ability or else the false humility of its lack--false in the sense of never tested. Either delusion would be so quickly dispatched in the course of any trial by iron that the iron could hardly be said to preserve so much as displace and decant the self's most slippery substance with something weightier, however well borne such weightiness may or may not prove. Entailed here is an element of danger and disruption which accounts well for the extension of popular aversion toward even any semblance of weight training (the irrational and vain fear of acquiring "bulk" or the marginally more rational fear of sustaining injury), be it though anymore so convincingly disguised as merely and humbly improvement.

We should not here succumb to the temptation to chastise this unease, folly though it surely proves, and instead commend its suspicion for dispelling what illusions of banal utility have come to supplant vain glory in the anachronistic conceit that "strong people are harder to kill." Such a conceit would seem to suggest that those who train merely hunt in order to eat when it is exceedingly more accurate and readily demonstrated to claim the opposite, that we unequivocally eat in order to hunt, that we enjoy the hunt as much as being the hunter well enough that its benefits spill over, even unto petty utility, not that others might merely eat, but that they might feast.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x80ab7a05F037DB2F3D63071ee546e6e6E118B790/0

Seldom do we regard the human form as specifically provocative outside of what varying degrees of sensually erotic presentation it may assume, and while very often this sort of provocation is accomplished by superficial embellishment it nevertheless must ultimately contend with the realities of flesh which beset it on all sides, to no exclusion of its own beholding. Behavioral and physical endowment by accident of material happenstance (social, genetic, etc.) is the usual thoroughfare for those few thusly privileged, and with considerably abysmal contrast to the greater mass of persons less favorably endowed. Yet is there at least one universally attainable tendency of form (or nearly so, barring but a handful of material maladies) and one undeniably provocative even well beyond what erotic appeal it may, or indeed may not bear forth: a tendency best characterized by the process of muscular development, or hypertrophy.

An immensity of muscle is provocative in a way unassailable by modesty of dress and manner, very nearly as obscene in its immunity to concealment as in what unabashed flaunting often enough attends such immensity. Most emblematic here is the bodybuilder's physique which any longer only suggests purposefulness rather than exemplifying its apex (as in the strongmen preceding it all the way back to antiquity). Which is to say that it has long since its inception jettisoned any pretense it ever indulged by demonstrable feats of strength, and all in peculiar favor of pageantry. Yet however incidentally does strength remain as consequence and facilitator of that hulking spectacle so far understood as particular to the bodybuilder, and it is only in this divorce of muscularity from all purpose other than arbitrary aesthetic idealization that an athleticism outside of any specificity of sport seems to emerge, aimless though it be.

What it means to wield so unimpeachably capable a form is as nebulous as the form itself likewise proves durably provocative within any popular notion thereof: practically without any distinctive purpose are "bulging muscles... as unnecessary as a classical education..."*; a surplus accumulation in every regard exceeding and upsetting all conventional notions of function or utility, both notions so obsequiously characterized by a pervasive temperance; sanguinely making a sport of so sore a matter as fleshly toils and sustenance. In short, muscularity is an obscenity socially designated only for the benefit of onlookers but as often an affront to modern unease which brooks no violation so little as to overstep the bounds of mere enjoyment.

Yet even as caricature and exaggeration (of itself) has bodybuilding as a practice (even informally as pageantry) proved ever ascendant, albeit in whatever degree watered down, as the singularly popular image of weight training, whether in pursuit of strength, health, or vanity, and has only waned really as victim to its own success and consequent bastardization--the ill appeal of both the "gym bro" and the slathered up "mass monster", as well its attendant universe of "bro science" and all manner of commercial snake oil. Waiting though patiently in wings all the while was the sport and science of strength, the former of which enjoyed briefly its own ascendancy (owed obliquely to a growing critical appreciation for the latter, as well the practical limits thereof) and has only itself waned in the reassertion of the narcissistic ideals and spectacle of bodybuilding, armed anew with a less-than-critical academic, as well a reinvigorated commercial appeal.

Bravely traversing the resultant no man's land between critical pragmatism and scrappy commercial narcissism however is so-called "natural" bodybuilding, ably and eagerly and, indeed, critically applying the practical lessons of both sport and science toward its own brand of temperate narcissism and wellness with a nostalgic bent. While falling prey to an arbitrary reverence for some bygone age of bodybuilding excellence and inheriting all the residual trappings and conventions thereof does the practice nevertheless distinguish itself by the unlikely company it keeps in both calisthenics and powerlifting, which together would seem a potent combination given the well-known shortcomings of either. This very combination would by itself already suggest a mode sufficient to some high level of bodily excellence and capability, albeit with none the more specific aim or purpose.

It is a mistake to imagine that bodybuilding somehow lost its way or purpose to have become so commercially and pharmacologically "compromised," to have been profaned in the intervening years since its bronze era. Indeed is the no man's land of natural bodybuilding an invention after-the-fact, having commanded no special reverence of its original and unwitting practitioners (and who could count them any more willing than witting), characterized most universally as simply discontented with themselves as anything short of extraordinary. What more would ever compel them to such rarefied heights of exertion and often joyless indulgence is as nontrivial to discern as what reservations might suffice to command they forgo any advantage in that regard. Easier to discern are the arbitrary conventions retained across all domains of bodybuilding, natural or otherwise, which is to say the specific targets of muscle size, as well those of general emaciation, the latter of which incidentally unable to do else but frustrate any progress in the former without significant pharmacological intervention.

Nevertheless do we find in bodybuilding's specifically arbitrary conventions of physique the suggestion of an exceedingly compensatory amalgamation of two types unique to sports of strength: one demanding of the forelimbs that they ably endure a singularly immense strain across all dimensions with no small ease; one demanding of the hindlimbs a nigh-boundless immensity of power production; either demanding of the trunk rigidity sufficient to demonstrate their respective capacities. This distinction we find to significant degree between calisthenics and powerlifting, as previously mentioned, but to its greatest extent in the Olympic events of gymnastics (at least in the men's variety) and weightlifting.

What grievance a bodybuilder might bear of any given sport of strength--apart from a general subordination of physique to performance--would surely find significant resolution in the measured combination of their respective training modalities. Yet this seldom resembles how a bodybuilder trains, though the results would conceivably bear no small measure of alignment as well even some degree of refinement as to what constitutes maximally balanced development. Instead does the bodybuilder obsess over "optimal" modalities for growth, geared toward arbitrary parameters based on little more than tradition among other insufficiently critical subjective criteria, though certainly driven by rational recognition of opportunity and a healthy thirst for glory--"because it's there" and so forth. Yet, while aesthetically there is a definite sense of being "too big" or to some extent "big enough" even among diehard enthusiasts (certainly of the natural proclivity, that proclivity significantly constraining its scope of ambition), the same could hardly be said of strength, even wheresoever it is eclipsed by a focus upon size; indeed size is pursued only as an expression of strength which is seldom attained in its absence.

This hardly constitutes a rebuke of bodybuilding as a practice, only a clarification of what it already tends toward, dispensing with its thin veneer while maintaining similar, and even more than similar outcomes, a way to reclaim performance as a criteria without denying its most palpable features, without allowing such a gulf to form between them, recognizing such a gulf as a mutual conceit between practices in similar measure "useful" and in far closer accord as useless or at least in considerable excess of any popular understanding of practicality, and rightly though tacitly and, to no lesser degree, woefully so.

Despite the excesses of any preoccupation with strength and hypertrophy, were we to consider the degree to which the various ills which beset persons the world over might be substantially alleviated, supplanted, or even exploited as well as, at the very least, assessed, we might be inclined toward such measures as convincingly both objective and meaningful with respect to well-being; namely in that they afford a higher and lifelong capacity for developmental maturation, so to speak, through effective kinesthetic and dietary play. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a person as free and autonomous when bereft of so basic, albeit uncommon a capacity, certainly for those who realize its attainment, but it is all the more difficult to regard a person as might be altogether unfamiliar with their value as well their methods of deriving such value as bearing any semblance of self-efficacy--often enough proving especially prone to an abundance of delusions if not sheer ignorance about bodily mechanics and metabolism. It is thus fair to attribute the provocative quality of muscularity to a popular unease--whether resentful or merely apprehensive--with such flagrant free-spiritedness, and of a sort which only eludes ambivalence by virtue of being so wrought, as it were, in flesh and its function.

Such palpable freedom of form, effort, and sustenance cannot but upset a prevailing temperance which counts itself as 'free from' innumerable contrivances of excess, never so indulgent as to even imagine what more freedom might be had of such excess in and of a sumptuous vigor met by rigors of like kind. Is it any wonder that among aspiring "improvers" of humanity that a discipline of denial and restraint reigns? that failing such an ascetic ideal do we find its mirror image in the solipsism of positivity and acceptance? itself no less tainted by the ascetic fly in its ointment for want of any excess of intervention and in denial of its very need, all the while paradoxically implying real need of such denial and, consequently, restraint on its behalf.

Even among those given to the excesses of bodybuilding does its characteristic audacity often lack wheresoever the emaciation of a desired physique prevails over the voluptuousness of ability (ironically often even over the ability to achieve said physique). This should not be confused as mere aesthetic innocence, mere taste, but rather as an aversion to the perceived harms of excess, to any undue stress upon some conceit of 'equilibrium,' often enough veiled under the quiet despair of "natural gifts" or the lack thereof--an unwillingness to "despoil" or else sheer trepidation.

There must be in all sincere acquaintance with the iron a sense of sacrifice and a willingness to destroy, and to destroy no lesser a thing than the self. There is a self inextricably bound up in delusions of form and ability or else the false humility of its lack--false in the sense of never tested. Either delusion would be so quickly dispatched in the course of any trial by iron that the iron could hardly be said to preserve so much as displace and decant the self's most slippery substance with something weightier, however well borne such weightiness may or may not prove. Entailed here is an element of danger and disruption which accounts well for the extension of popular aversion toward even any semblance of weight training (the irrational and vain fear of acquiring "bulk" or the marginally more rational fear of sustaining injury), be it though anymore so convincingly disguised as merely and humbly improvement.

We should not here succumb to the temptation to chastise this unease, folly though it surely proves, and instead commend its suspicion for dispelling what illusions of banal utility have come to supplant vain glory in the anachronistic conceit that "strong people are harder to kill." Such a conceit would seem to suggest that those who train merely hunt in order to eat when it is exceedingly more accurate and readily demonstrated to claim the opposite, that we unequivocally eat in order to hunt, that we enjoy the hunt as much as being the hunter well enough that its benefits spill over, even unto petty utility, not that others might merely eat, but that they might feast.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x80ab7a05F037DB2F3D63071ee546e6e6E118B790/0